Another reason we're doing a terrible job on the coronavirus.
There are many reasons the United States has done a terrible job stopping Covid-19. Here’s a new one: We’re perfectionists. |
No, I’m not completely insane. That’s basically the case that Aaron Carroll, a doctor and contributing opinion writer, makes in his Op-Ed today, and I think it’s a persuasive one. |
For months, we didn’t cover our faces, because we thought only the most effective, hospital-grade masks were worth wearing, and there weren’t enough of those to go around. Now, we’re trying to give everyone the gold-standard of Covid-19 test even though, as Aaron points out, “the swab is uncomfortable, the test is slow, and the supplies to perform it are in short supply.” |
There are, it turns out, alternatives. We could test saliva. We could test samples from groups of people at the same time, and retest individuals only if a batch comes up positive. We could even let people test themselves. These tests aren’t perfect, he says. They would miss some sick people. But they would let us identify far more infections far more quickly, which is the only way short of a vaccine to stop this pandemic. |
“With testing, just like with masks, more is sometimes better than perfect,” he writes. |
Those American perfectionists showed up in another Op-Ed this morning, this one by Emily Oster, the economist beloved by pregnant women for assuring us that we could still drink coffee. In today’s piece she’s writing about schools, and about what they should do when — inevitably — a teacher gets sick. |
The good news is that data from countries that have opened schools suggests that teachers are no more likely to get the virus than others. But that doesn’t mean they won’t get it at all. “If 5 percent of adults in a community have Covid-19,” Emily writes, we’d expect 5 percent of teachers to have it, too. |
This is an issue for the perfectionists, some of whom are demanding that schools stay shut until there isn’t a single case of Covid-19 in the area for at least two weeks. This, Emily says, is “effectively a mandate to not open at all, possibly ever.” |
That’s a scary idea for parents like me. I’ve been trying to get my oldest kid to practice writing his letters in preparation for kindergarten. As an experiment I told him he could say any rude word he wanted if he wrote it down first. Now he can spell one word, and it’s “fart.” |
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